Read Online Angel: Private Eye Book One by Odette C. Bell - Free Book Online

But the decision
was made, the contract was signed, and my life would never be the
same again.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 5
    I bit my lip and chewed industriously.
    So this was meant to be my room. Mr
Marvelous had been generous when he’d referred to it as a storage
cupboard. It was barely 3m by 2m. You could stand in it, stretch
your arms out, and spin in a circle, but that’s only if you wanted
to ram into the furniture that cluttered every wall, not to mention
the old archive boxes spewing their files over every centimeter of
the floor.
    I made no attempt whatsoever to hide my
disgust as Mr Marvelous rolled up his sleeves for about the 10th
time and nodded towards the window. “Beautiful view, isn’t it?”
    “Maybe, but I can’t exactly sleep on a
view,” I said pointedly as I grimaced at what looked like a bed
under a mound of newspaper clippings.
    “No problem,” Mr Marvelous said cheerily as
he walked over to the bed and reached a hand behind one of his
suspenders. Again, there was a twang. If you listened carefully,
the exact note wasn’t accounted for by the tension in his
suspenders. It echoed too powerfully through the room and set the
hair on the back of my neck standing on end.
    He pulled out a set of gloves the likes of
which I’d never seen. They looked like black leather, yet at the
same time they had lines of magical light running from the fingers
to a small box at the wrists.
    Mr Marvelous crammed them on his hands and
set to work cleaning up the newspaper clippings and stacking up the
boxes.
    Just when I thought he intended to
industriously clean the entire room, he gave a happy sigh and
yanked the gloves off, tossing them to the floor. “You can do the
rest,” he said.
    Just as I let out the tiniest frustrated
harrumph, the gloves suddenly came to life. They continued to clean
the room, essentially copying the exact moves Marvelous had taught
them.
    He must’ve caught the stunned look in my
eyes, because he chucked his head back and laughed. “Not too
familiar with the otherworld, are you? That’s a simple set of
cleaning gloves, Lizzie. You’ll find them available for a couple of
hundred dollars from most good magical supply stores. They’re not
perfect, and you tend to have to give them a very specific set of
instructions or you’ll come back to find they’ve cleaned a hole in
your wall, but they’ll get the job done quickly enough.”
    I suddenly jerked back as the gloves picked
up a box of archive files and flew from the room. The move was so
fast it flattened my fringe over my forehead.
    At times like this – when I saw something
truly magical – I felt a familiar spark of fear in my heart. The
same spark of fear I’d felt the day the world had woken up to find
that magical creatures lived amongst us. Despite everything that
had happened to me, I still thought of myself as normal. As just an
ordinary human in a place where witches were real and vampires
owned the biggest investment firms in town.
    Mr Marvelous kept chuckling at me until his
phone rang. He shoved a hand into his pocket and grabbed it out. He
answered before he crammed it against his ear. “What have you got
for me, Arnie?” he snarled.
    I swiveled my attention between Mr Marvelous
and the magical gloves. That was, until Mr Marvelous took an
uncharacteristic hiss of a breath that rasped through his teeth
like ragged metal over glass.
    I felt my chest tighten.
    Mr Marvelous swore, hung up the phone, and
jammed it behind one of his suspenders. Then he jerked his gaze
towards me. “You ready for your first case, kid?”
    I blinked quickly. “Sorry? I mean isn’t this
a little early? I’m just moving in.”
    “There’s no such thing as early. Like I said
before, you signed a contract. I take my business very seriously. I
spent a lot of hard years carving out a niche for myself in this
city, and a reputation to match my hard work. People call on Mr
Marvelous Investigations when they have the kind of